Subscription Options

Blog

Thank you to the VoyageMIA Magazine for making us part of the ''Inspiring Stories'' of the South Broward collection.

This article tells part of the history and goals of Edu1st and how Ana María Fernández and Gilberto Pinzón, with a great team, created the best educational model for the 21st Century Era, the VESS Model.

Why, even though there are new developments in science that allow us to affirm that we learn through experiences, and those experiences necessarily involve the senses, the learning process in the formal education has been focused in limited sensory experiences? (Boynton, n.d.). Our senses are the means that let us collect the necessary information from the world, so that we can processes it later in our brain through the creation of synaptic connections, and this is what we call “learning”. This is why the experiences that we have from day to day must be meaningful, as they will ensure new learning and the construction of new knowledge. However, diverse and meaningful sensory experiences in formal education are limited. Thus, text books and master classes have been the predominant means to transmit information. But both learning and achieving a comprehensive understanding of the world are processes that involve corporeal experiences, which also include multiple senses (Classen, 1999; Claxton, 2015).

The Western educational system, has given the most prominence to the senses of sight and hearing, leaving aside our other senses: touch, taste, smell, kinesthetic and the proprioceptive (Classen, 1999). In this way, education is restraining students’ experiences and as a result, limits their learning, ways they can relate to their environment, and communicate their thoughts. For these reasons, we can ask ourselves, how can we integrate our senses as part of the learning, understanding and thinking development of students? Nowadays, there are multiple strategies that allow the senses to be taken as an essential part of the learning process. Giving experiences a main role in the classrooms.

Even though it has been a topic that has generated debate for decades, and has been discussed by people including Montessori (1912) and Dale (Dale, 1946), the process of changing paradigms regarding the incorporation of the senses in education has been a slow process. This process has been consolidated in different strategies or flows that invite educators, in an innovative way, to integrate the senses in education. Some of these Known strategies are:

The Maker Movement. The students become creators of physical or digital products and services, taking advantage of their creativity and access to open knowledge. In this way, the experience of producing is a privilege, as it can generate multiple opportunities to involve the senses and to promote learning through doing (Rosenfeld, Halverson & Sheridan, 2014).

Flipped Classrooms. Classroom work is focused in creating projects, making exercises, participating in discussions or debates, conducting experiments, etc., while time out of the classroom is used for other learning processes, such as research. In this way, sensory experiences have an important role as a mechanism to develop skills, as a source of understanding and implementing knowledge (Flipped Classrooms, n.d).

Artful Thinking. By using this methodology, art is involved not just in the creation of artistic works, but also by using the exploration of art as an engine to promote thinking, new learning and knowledge (Project Zero, n.d).

All these new projects and strategies are already an active part of the education system in different parts of the world. They are examples of a turning point in education that is giving more importance to experiences, and therefore, the senses in the learning process.

It is important to consider all of these tendencies and their theoretical bases, so that we can generate new ways to promote meaningful learning in our classrooms. Sensory experiences are not the main goal of education; these are promoted as part of the learning process, because they give students the opportunity to build their comprehension and abstraction of concepts, and help them to make sense of knowledge and learning. They connect, as well, what has been learnt with learning strategies to the students’ daily life, making learning more meaningful and inclusive. A student who is capable of thinking strategically about his/her senses, and who considers that thought and learning involve both his/her brain and body as a unit, is a person capable of relating to the world in a state of constant learning and exploration.

Taking all of the above into account, we can include these 10 suggestions from the VESS model:

Recognize, as teachers, which senses are we focusing on and how we can include, in a balanced way, all of our senses in the curriculum. 

Find ways to add different senses by using innovative strategies, with a clear purpose.

Explore multiple sensory experiences to build knowledge. When talking about a plant, do not just see the plant; smell it, taste it, hear it, mimic its movement, touch the plant (always taking care of your safety) and develop knowledge from there.

Invite to do. Doing should be part of learning and comprehension.

Involve students in the solution of real problems.

Allow yourself to reorganize the priorities of the students’ learning processes. Allow time for students to explore their knowledge at different times and through various means, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Connect areas of knowledge that we usually isolate in traditional education, such as arts or sports with physics and math.

Avoid separating sensory experiences from the learning process. For example, movement must occur beyond the limited space of physical education.

Involve moments of sensory experiences that we usually isolate from the exploration of traditional areas of knowledge: meal times, play times or even recesses can become moments that are part of the learning processes.

Reflect on the use of the senses: which senses that were used, what they were used for, and what was the purpose of involving that sense in relation to the learning objectives?

In the Fourth Congress on Education: “Changing the Vision of How to Teach and Learn”, carried out the 2 nd of June, 2017 at Santiago de Chile, a panel of experts shared their knowledge, experiences and learning regarding the Congress’ main topic. Among the panel members was our founder, Ana María Fernández. We want to share with you some of the knowledge and pearls of wisdom that we believe are important from each presentation. We believe that these insights will be useful for you to reflect on, and that they will be able to help you to generate new and valuable learning in your personal and professional lives.

In his presentation, Daniel Wilson reminded us about the importance of working on thinking as a disposition. In other words, thinking must be used, putting it into practice through the right actions. He also gave us an explanation for the concept of agency, which is related to the idea of “self-management”. Wilson emphasized that the management of our thinking, as well as the learning lessons, must be done through the design. This is related to the elements we presented in our first VESS training, “The Power of Making Thinking Visible”, in which we also refer to meta-strategy. Through this process, as educators, we design learning contexts that enable acting and thinking in a strategical way, thus becoming architects of contexts.

For his part, Douglas Fisher emphasized the research done by John Hattie, in which he established that 90% of what we do as teachers does not have a big impact on our students’ learning processes, while the other 5% goes into processes that are detrimental to learning, and just 5% of our work has a positive impact on the student, accelerating real and meaningful learning. Because of this, we need to recognize which of our tasks have a positive impact so we can adjust our work and make it more efficient. In our VESS training, we have reviewed the research and we focused our efforts on trying to make this difference apply to the way we teach. Fisher says that “having a good teacher should not be a matter of luck, but a right”, and with this he invites us to remember that the learning process has different levels of depth and that all teachers must be aware of these, regardless of the different areas in which we teach.

Finally, Ana María Fernández focused her presentation on the relevance of understanding the educational change as a collective work that allows the construction of a Thinking Culture. Ana María directed her words to the leaders of educational institutions and asked them “to give permission” or allow their teachers to become apprentices and experience the entire learning process, from this perspective. She also talked to the teachers about the fears we face when we live in paradigm shift and the multiple strategies we can adopt in order to change our paradigms.